Amazon is giving one more ability to its Alexa Skills

Amazon is giving one more ability to its Alexa Skills– i.e fetching information regarding user locations.
In order to help Alexa developers develop more functional and engaging Alexa Skills, Amazon has introduced some new tools for development.

Now developers can use the new Device Address API to build Alexa skills .These skills operate using people’s location data, which includes street addresses, zip codes, and country locations. Coders can use APIs, or application programming interfaces and build powerful apps using data from different sources.

“Your skill, for example, can deliver food and groceries to a customer’s home or provide directions to a nearby gym,” said Alexa evangelist Jeff Blankenburg in a blog post today.

The new API with added functionality allows developers to build skills wherein users provide consent to share information. To add an extra layer of protection users can only agree to share their location via the Alexa mobile app and not by voice. As users will explicitly have to agree to this data sharing, it would avoid any accidental confirmations.

Along with the API tool, a skills analytics dashboard has also been made available to the developers of Alexa skills. This dashboard would be able track information like total unique utterances, month-over-month skill adoption rates, , or the time of day users typically interact with skill.

Brands like Just Eat, Accuweather and German retail chain, Real have already integrated the new API to their own apps.